CHISELED STONE BRICKS

The Mason sells 4 at apprentice for 1 emerald, and nobody buys it back off you at any tier. Like stone and its other cut cousins, this one only ever moves toward the player.

A crafting grid needs 2 stone brick slab to build it, itself a slab cut from ordinary stone bricks on a stonecutter, so the finished block sits at the far end of a chain that starts with plain stone. Breaking a placed one needs no special tool: unlike raw stone, it drops itself for anyone who mines it. Its infested twin, the silverfish block, looks identical from a distance and is worth checking for before quarrying a wall of it.

A Mason at Apprentice sells 4 chiseled stone bricks for 1 emerald. The price is fixed in the trade file rather than rolled inside a range, so a second Mason at that tier quotes exactly the same.

Chiseled Stone Bricks sells for as little as 1 emerald for 4 at a time, from the Mason at the Apprentice tier, and 1 of the other 9 costs less. The price is fixed rather than rolled, so a second Mason will quote you exactly the same.

The Mason at its apprentice tier asks 1 emerald for 4 chiseled stone bricks. 8 of the 72 villagers that pay emeralds, emptied out:

a diamond against 24 flint for the same 1 emerald, 24 times the carrying, and the shortest wait is the Mason at 37.5 real seconds of shelf, gathering not counted.

A freshly employed Mason does not open with this row. He needs 10 trade experience banked before apprentice unlocks, level 2 of five, which in practice means a round of his opening trades first.

Once open, the slot sells 4 at a time, 16 times before it locks, and a villager restocks at most twice a Minecraft day. Nothing about the block being a processed, chiseled variant speeds that clock up.

16 purchases close the slot, and the wait after that runs 2 real minutes flat no matter how fast the trades themselves go through. Two of those refills fit inside one Minecraft day, itself 20 real minutes long.

Worked that hard, one Mason hands over 128 chiseled stone bricks for 32 emeralds across a single day, the ceiling for a single villager no matter how much longer someone waits around.

Clearing the shelf costs 16 emeralds for 64 blocks before the slot locks for a restock, skipping the stonecutter step of turning stone bricks into slabs and the crafting step after that.

Where the emeralds come from: the same Mason pays an emerald per 10 clay balls, his cheapest raw material, an easy way to fund a decorative purchase like this one without touching a pickaxe.

Also on the Mason's list: granite, andesite, diorite, polished andesite, polished granite and polished diorite.

Chiseled stone bricks are the end of a chain: stone becomes stone bricks, stone bricks become slabs, and two slabs stacked in the grid give the chiseled block. A stonecutter shortens that to a single step, which is exactly what the Mason's trade replaces.

The carved face is what people buy it for, since it breaks up a wall of plain brick without changing the palette. Silverfish hide inside the infested version, which looks identical, so a block found in a stronghold is worth treating with more caution than one you bought.

Chiseled stone brick carries a face carved into it, which makes it the one stone block with a picture rather than a pattern. In generated structures it turns up as a marker: ocean ruins and strongholds use it exactly where a builder would use a keystone.

That is how most people use it too. A wall of stone brick with a single chiseled block over the door reads as deliberate in a way an unbroken wall never does.

It shares a family with cracked and mossy stone brick, and the cracked version comes from smelting an ordinary one, so a whole ruined look is available from the same starting block.